Looking for the Resistance
The true believers came out to the People’s March in D.C., but a mass movement against Trump 2.0 failed to materialize.
Hamilton Nolan
I remember The Resistance. You can say that it was corny, that it was ineffective, that it was performative or overmatched or misguided. But you can’t say it wasn’t real. It happened. In 2017, Trump’s first inauguration was a miserable, lightly attended affair. And then, the very next day, all of downtown DC was choked by a heaving mass of hundreds of thousands of incensed people at the Women’s March — a march in name only, because the sheer size of it made it impossible for the thing to do more than shuffle along gently in a sea of feminist indignation. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, there were several months when the entire country vibrated with the footsteps of angry protesters, a movement large enough to prompt politicians and corporations to scramble to appear concerned about justice, whether they were or not. While separate, those two episodes were consecutive points on a line of Resistance that had been building for years.
Now, the deformed coalition of internet-poisoned fascists and the billionaires who built the infrastructure to poison them is sweeping back into power. At the same time, The Resistance feels like a pricked balloon, alive but dissipating. It makes you wonder where the juice has gone.
At 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, the people trickled into downtown Washington, D.C. for the People’s March. Four grey-haired retirees in matching Columbia hiking shoes pulled on their sensible rain gear as they stepped off the train at Farragut North, joking about how Democrats didn’t seem to be able to control the weather. It was cold and wet in Farragut Square, one of the staging areas for the march. Mist coalesced on your eyelashes and dripped down into your eyes. In the center of it all stood the stolid statue of Admiral Farragut, flanked on all four corners by mortars. He was a man who broke the Confederate hold on New Orleans during the Civil War by unleashing a bombardment of fire. His resistance was of the direct kind.
In the square, the pussy hats had returned. Perched atop the heads of women young and old, pink knitted caps, some of them bearing the word “Nasty” in cursive across the forehead. Some of these hats had clearly been saved since the 2017 Women’s March, resurrected now from the backs of dresser drawers. Others were newly purchased from the vendors who prowled the park, hawking them along with flags and t-shirts and pink baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Pussy Power.” This was The Resistance of the first Trump era transplanted into the second. In its lower numbers, it felt quaint rather than mighty.
The protest crowd was largely, though not solely, retirees and young people. These are the two groups of people who have the easiest time, logistically speaking, attending a protest. A simple heuristic for telling how widespread a protest movement is, therefore, is by taking note of what portion of protest crowds do not fall into those groups. The People’s March — which was the biggest pre-inauguration protest of Trump and all he stands for — was composed, in large measure, of the usual suspects. Elderly lefties and students, communists and Jewish Voice for Peace and the Sierra Club, keffiyeh-clad Palestine freedom marchers and trans rights and abortion rights and civil rights activists. All of these groups, to be clear, represented vital issues. They are the heart and soul of the Left. To see old people with curved spines hobbling along the street because they believe their nation can be better than it is is a soul-stirring sight. These were the most reliably moral people in the country. These were the people who make up movements. What they were not, unfortunately, was a mass movement.
On K street, across from the square, there is a Pret, which was packed that morning with people ordering breakfast and staying warm before the march began. Behind the counter of the Pret, the employees, almost all of whom were young Black and Brown people, flew back and forth filling and calling out coffee orders: “One large oat milk latte! One medium, extra milk!”
When The Resistance was strong, the people working at that Pret would have been in the streets as well. That is the difference. It is hard to imagine us striking fear into the heart of the oligarchy until we can get those workers in the streets once again.
At 11 a.m., thousands who had gathered several blocks away marched down I street, preceded by a handful of police SUVs, and we all fell in behind them. The fully assembled crowd turned south and streamed down 17th street, taking on the apparent endlessness that characterizes big protests, a quality that does tend to fill the lonely with courage. Here and there, small clumps of Trump fans gathered along the sidewalk to gawk at the marchers, in the same way that leftists from Vermont might gawk at a University of Texas college football tailgate party — a cultural spectacle they had only seen on TV, revolting but somewhat interesting. One right-wing comedian with a hand puppet and a headset mic, accompanied by a cameraperson, ran up and down the crowd making fun of people, like a cursed and not funny version of Triumph the Insult Dog. A bearded Christian dragged a large wooden cross down the sidewalk for some reason. The cross had a wheel on the bottom, for the purpose of smoother dragging, prompting one marcher to jeer, “Jesus’s cross didn’t have a wheel! Jesus, take the wheel!” But for the most part, those who had come to town to celebrate the inauguration did not appear on the streets at all. Not worth getting chilly.
The Left has been conducting grand protest marches through Washington, D.C. for generations. To understand why these marches seem to have less effect on the world than they used to, consider one small incident: One lone MAGA counterprotester who was heckling the passing crowd on 17th street was gently escorted down a side street by a group of cops. A dozen or so camera-wielding reporters, in search of action, followed in a little scrum, taping the man’s jeers all the while. Behind them, out of sight of the cameras, tens of thousands of protesters with all their banners and signs passed by. For those who saw news of this protest on the internet — the way that most people see it — there is a fair chance that what they see is clip of that lone counterprotester, hollering and surrounded by police, rather than the thousands and thousands of activists in the streets. This flattening effect is one reason why a rich man with a large X account is now telling the president what to do.
The crowd, with frozen toes, made its way to the Lincoln Memorial, filling in along both sides of the ice-encrusted reflecting pool. On the barely-perceptible podium up front, a series of speakers said things that need to be said. “Today, we have a choice: to accept a future that is forced upon us, or to fight for a future that we want,” said one.
“How many people have felt despondency?” said another. “But how many people feel different now that we’re all here together today?” These were the basic truths that Americans who fear what is coming for us need to internalize: It is time to fight. It is time to come together. It is time, yes, to resist, more than ever before. An hour into the program, though, the crowd had dwindled into a small knot clustered up close to the stage, a single fingertip of what was, in past years, a fully clenched fist. The last time the fist was raised, in 2020, the political backlash even from the feckless Democratic Party was intense enough to demoralize all but the most committed believers — those who had come back, again, at this low moment. Most of the rest of the country seems to have judged it to all be not worth the price of hand warmers.
The people that turn up to the People’s March are democracy’s believers, the core of the eventual solution to democracy’s problems. Yet the problems can sometimes dwarf those who believe they are fixable. That is the vibe in January 2025. On the backs of the t-shirts that the vendors were selling to commemorate the march was the slogan, “WE NOT GOING BACK.” That much is for sure. We not going back. We’re going forward, into something even worse. Saturday was cold, but Sunday will be colder. And Monday will be colder still. And every day after that will be colder still. At least for a while.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
